Skip to main content

AI Software Creates “New” Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Doors & Amy Winehouse Songs: Hear Tracks from the “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club”

What would pop music sound like now if the musicians of the 27 club had lived into maturity? Can we know where Amy Winehouse would have gone, musically, if she had taken another path? What if Hendrix’s influence over guitar heroics (and less obvious styles) came not only from his sixties playing but from an unimaginable late-career cosmic blues? Whether questions like these can ever be given real flesh and blood, so to speak, by artificial intelligence may still be very much undecided.

Of course, it may not be for us to decide. “The charts of 2046,” Mark Beaumont predicts at NME, “will  be full of 12G code-pop songs, baffling to the human brain, written by banks of composerbots purely for the Spotify algorithm to recommend to its colonies of ÆPhone listening farms.” Seems as likely as any other future music scenario at this point. In the meantime, we still get to judge the successes, such as they are, of AI songwriters on human merits.

The Beatles-esque “Daddy’s Car,” the most notable computer-generated tribute song to date, was “composed by AI… capable of learning to mimic a band’s style from its entire database of songs.” The program produced a competent pastiche that nonetheless sounds like “cold computer psychedelia — eerie stuff.” What do we, as humans, make of Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, a compilation of songs composed in the style of musicians who infamously perished by suicide or overdose at the tender age of 27?

The “tapes” include four tracks designed to sound like lost songs from Hendrix, Winehouse, Nirvana, and the Doors. Highlighting a handful of artists who left us too soon in order to address “music’s mental health crisis,” the project used Magenta, the same Google AI as “Daddy’s Car,” to analyze the artists’ repertoires, as Rolling Stone explains:

For the Lost Tapes project, Magenta analyzed the artists’ songs as MIDI files, which works similarly to a player-piano scroll by translating pitch and rhythm into a digital code that can be fed through a synthesizer to recreate a song. After examining each artist’s note choices, rhythmic quirks, and preferences for harmony in the MIDI file, the computer creates new music that the staff could pore over to pick the best moments.

There is significant human input, such as the curation of 20 or 30 songs fed to the computer, broken down separately into different parts of the arrangement. Things did not always go smoothly. Kurt Cobain’s “loose and aggressive guitar playing gave Magenta some trouble,” writes Endgadget, “with the AI mostly outputting a wall of distortion instead of something akin to his signature melodies.”

Judge the end results for yourself in “Drowned by the Sun,” above. The music for all four songs is synthesized with MIDI files. “An artificial neural network was then used to generate the lyrics,” Eddie Fu writes at Consequence of Sound, “while the vocals were recorded by Eric Hogan, frontman of an Atlanta Nirvana tribute band.” Other songs feature different sound-alike vocalists (more or less). In no ways does the project claim that MIDI-generated computer files can replace actual musicians.

They’re affectionate tributes, made by players without hearts, but they don’t really tell us anything about what, say, Jim Morrison would have done if he hadn’t died at 27. Yet the cause is a noble one: a rejection of the romantic idea at the heart of the “27 Club” narrative — that mental illness, substance abuse, etc. should be glamorized in any way. “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club is the work of Over the Bridge,” notes Fu, “a Toronto organization that helps members of the music industry struggling with mental illness.” Learn more about the project here and about Over the Bridge’s programs here.

Related Content: 

Artificial Intelligence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Difference Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

Nick Cave Answers the Hotly Debated Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writing Essays, Books & Songs, to Performing Surgery and Driving Trucks

Artificial Intelligence Program Tries to Write a Beatles Song: Listen to “Daddy’s Car”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

AI Software Creates “New” Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, Doors & Amy Winehouse Songs: Hear Tracks from the “Lost Tapes of the 27 Club” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3fMKXs7
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more